A Name To Exist: The Example of the Pseudonym on the Internet

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, song IX, Ulysses chooses the anthroponomy Nobody to escape the Cyclops. This onomastic game operates on two levels of meaning: the first referring to the anthroponomical fact, and the second to the lexicon, more specifically, to the common name. Ahead of his time, Ulysses would have surfed the Internet under the pseudonym Nobody…The nomination of a name allows all world objects to be included within the human paradigm. If to nominate is also an act which allows the social subject to be part of civil society and to be well-known and recognised by the other, what about nomination and pseudonyms on the internet?This book investigates this question through both a detailed study of the nomination of objects of the world and two surveys of Internet users and of a corpus of pseudonyms collected on forums and blogs on online newspapers.